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That was the rice minister (really).

Hydropower is literally good for the climate.

The kneejerk reaction is gonna be "Meta bad", but it's actually a bit more complicated.

Whatever faults Meta has in other areas, it's been mostly a good player in the AI space. They're one of the major reasons we have strong open-weight AI models today. Mistral, another maker of open AI models and Europe's only significant player in AI, has also rejected this code of conduct. By contrast, OpenAI a.k.a. ClosedAI has committed to signing it, probably because they are the incumbents and they think the increased compliance costs will help kill off competitors.

Personally, I think the EU AI regulation efforts are a big missed opportunity. They should have been used to force a greater level of openness and interoperability in the industry. With the current framing, they're likely to end up entrenching big proprietary AI companies like OpenAI, without doing much to make them accountable at all, while also burying upstarts and open source projects under unsustainable compliance requirements.

The EU AI Act is the thing that imposes the big fines, and it's pretty big and complicated, so companies have complained that it's hard to know how to comply. So this voluntary code of conduct was released as a sample procedure for compliance, i.e. "if you do things this way, you (probably) won't get in trouble with regulators".

It's also worth noting that not all the complaints are unreasonable. For example, the code of conduct says that model makers are supposed to take measures to impose restrictions on end-users to prevent copyright infringement, but such usage restrictions are very problematic for open source projects (in some cases, usage restrictions can even disqualify a piece of software as FOSS).

Pretty much the same set of circumstances as in Europe. Slow economic growth + dissatisfaction about young voters + inflation + establishment party lacking any plan beyond muddling along => populist revolt => governing gets even harder and things get worse.

Chinese steel is cheaper than Canadian steel... Canadian steel is being targeted by tariffs in America, we need to make sure that as many Canadian companies as possible are using Canadian steel

This makes no logical sense. When Canadian steel are priced out of the US by tariffs, the supply available for domestic use goes up, which would normally cause the price to fall, already automatically reducing the price advantage of Chinese steel.

Basically, this is a convoluted way to keep steel prices high, to the detriment of Canadian manufacturers that use steel.

Protecting local industries a.k.a. pandering to special interests. Sectoral tariffs are just as corrupt and pernicious when Trump levies them on Canadian steel and cars, as when Canada levies them on other countries' steel and cars.

At this point, Tesla needs to steal IP from them, not the other way round.

Fermentation-made milk substitute was available at supermarkets in Singapore (under the brand name Very Dairy, though the original product was from the startup Perfect Day). I really liked it---a lot nicer than oat milk for drinking straight up. Unfortunately it went off the shelves after a while, seems like demand wasn't high :-(

I'm curious whether Deepseek will gaf about this. They've been rather uninterested in commercialization, and the app is mainly a way of showing off their model, which itself is released open-weights. In fact, it's literally impossible to spend money in the app! They sell tokens but it's API-only, and you can't spend it in the app.

So it's entirely possible the Deepseek will shrug, let their app be banned in Germany, and keep doing what they're doing.

It's a bit hard to believe, but the vast majority of China's manufacturing is consumed in China. They're actually not that export oriented compared to other countries like Germany or Japan, it's just the scale that makes them such an export juggernaut. The flip side of this is that most of the energy use is also actually China's own energy use.

And China's energy use is increasing simply because its people are getting richer and consuming more. Based on this, I don't think China is the main concern. There are lots more developing countries that will likewise use more energy as they develop. China's green transition seems to be going full tilt, but I'm not sure those other countries can transition as quickly.